A few years ago a friend who wishes to remain nameless suggested that it was about time I started writing a blog.

"Why would I want to do that?" I said.

"Because it's the future and you'd be good at it," he said.

So I gave it a go and I've been here ever since. But not for any longer I'm afraid. Today is the sad day when I must bid you all farewell. I have been appointed Chief Sustainability Consultant at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, working directly to one of my all-time-heroes Ed Davey, with a juicy, taxpayer-funded salary, a ring-fenced pension and a bio-fuel-powered Aston-Martin just like the Prince of Wales's.

No, not really, about the second bit. Just the first bit: I'm off to pasture… Read More

Roald Dahl wasn’t afraid to tell children the truth because he knew they are a bloodthirsty lot

One of the giraffes at Copenhagen Zoo has been killed, publicly dissected then fed to the lions. Public outrage has been immense. “How could they do such a cruel and terrible thing?” people are asking on Twitter and elsewhere. “And what kind of a sick, weird parent would you have to be to take your children to watch a giraffe being cut up with a surgeon’s knife?”

Let me have a stab at answering the second question first, because I’m one of those sick, weird parents. If I’d been anywhere near Denmark that day, I too would have eagerly dragged my kids along to the zoo’s operating theatre to witness the ghoulish but fascinating Inside Nature’s Giants-style spectacle.

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical". Thomas Jefferson, 1779.

One of the curses of modern life is the plethora of "charitable" lobbying groups demanding that the government take more regulatory action in areas where most of us believe the state has no business interfering.

Almost every day you read in the papers that some apparently grassroots movement, supposedly speaking for all of us, thinks more should be done to stop us drinking, smoking, eating sugar or salt, make us less sexist, force us to spend more on foreign aid or environmental issues. But if that wasn't annoying enough, here's the worst thing of all: we're paying for these unrepresentative, mostly left-leaning lobby groups with our… Read More

Undoubtedly the most annoying word in the world – at least when uttered in the context of Shakespeare – is "relevant."

Shakespeare is always relevant because Shakespeare is Shakespeare. But whenever a director puts on a new production these days, they're almost invariably asked – or feel compelled to justify – what this particular interpretation has to say to the modern world.

Anyway, inevitably, the dread "r" nuisance cropped up again the other night when cinemas around the world broadcast a livecast of the sell-out Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston.

In an interview during the interval, Emma Freud asked the director what the play had to say to modern audiences. (I could have answered that one. It says: "I star the Old Etonian bloke in Thor and who wa… Read More

Popcorn time in Westminster this week, where the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee met to grill two sets of witnesses on the pros and cons of the IPCC's 5th Assessment review. (Watch the video here) H/t Bishop Hill.

Three things stood out for me: the bullying, bluster and arrogance of the committee's chairman Tim Yeo; the unnecessary rudeness of John Robertson MP ("Not a lot of people agree with you. You've had your chance to sell your book," he told Donna Laframboise who had flown over from Canada especially to testify); and the wearied patience teetering on the brink of Olympian contempt of Dr Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric physics at MIT.

With ministers like Nicky Morgan, who needs an opposition? writes m'learned colleague Damian Thompson. A good question, well asked. But that doesn't mean I'm going to resist the opportunity to stick the boot in to this appalling woman I'd never heard of before but who is now right up there with Nick Boles, Oliver Wetwin, Kenneth Clarke, Tim Yeo, Baroness Warsi, Lord Deben, Greg Barker – crikey, I'm going to get RSI typing all the names – on the list of people I hold personally responsible for utterly ruining the Conservative party.

Why can't I resist? Well it's a tribal thing, innit. Just as Dan Hodges likes nothing better than castigating his home team Labour for failing to do whatever it is he think… Read More

Women who work in the City and have children are worth less than men, Nigel Farage has said. Brave man.

Here are his exact words, as addressed to a City of London conference on the European Union:
In many cases women make different choices in life to the ones men make, simply for biological reasons.

A woman who has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off – she is worth far less to her employer when she comes back than when she went away because that client base won't be stuck as rigidly to her portfolio.

I don't believe that in the big banks and brokerage houses and Lloyds of London and everyone else in the City, I do not believe there is any discrimination against women at all.

I think young, able women that are prepared to sacrifice the family life and stick with… Read More

In this week's Spectator I have a rant about all those pressure groups you see quoted in all the papers pretty much every day. Some are small, obscure and marginal – Bright Blue, the think tank for Lib Dems who want to play at being Tories, comes to mind – while some sound superficially respectable – the British Medical Association, say. What they all have in common is that they tend, on the whole, to lend far, far too much credibility to a hardcore of professional activists whose tedious and unhelpful opinions we would most of us do better to ignore completely.

Christopher Snowdon is very good on this. In the last month, he has been fighting mano a mano against the health campaigners who think we're experiencing… Read More

Benefits Street, Channel 4's hit, fly on the wall documentary about a Birmingham street full of welfare claimants, is a gross distortion of reality.

We know this because a group of charity heads has written to the Telegraph to say so. They claim to speak for more than 100 charities and community groups, all of which are "calling on Channel 4, as a public service broadcaster, to review how this damaging and grossly unbalanced programme came to be shown."

Apparently the series focuses on "an unrepresentative minority", "reinforcing harmful stereotypes where the most extreme examples are presented as the norm."

Gosh. I wonder how they know. For example, when I checked the annual accounts of one of the concerned charities, I couldn't help noticing that its top paid employee – presumably the chief executive who signed the letter – get… Read More

So now we know yet another reason why the BBC is so biased in its reporting on climate change: because in 2006 the Labour government effectively paid it to be so. It was a £67,000 grant from the Department for International Development (DFID) which paid for the notorious, secret high-level seminar at which the BBC was persuaded to abandon all pretence at neutrality on the global warming issue. I expect the BBC's environmental analyst Roger Harrabin just can't wait to get his teeth into this major scandal.

Oh no, wait, I forgot: Harrabin was the seminar's organiser. (Don't worry, Rog. I promise not to remind anyone. We Oxbridge English Literature graduates must stick together, eh?)

Anyway, I notice one or two feathers have been ruffled by the Mail On Sunday's suggestion that… Read More